Home and Family

5 Home and Family UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS Copyright © 2017 (and distributed by) Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution 06_JAG_8251_ch05_148_307.indd 148 18/08/16 12:26 PM hat makes a house a W home? “Home” suggests sanctuary, loved ones, nourishment — a place where everybody knows your name. The term is woven deep into our language as well as our consciousness. Consider the connotations of homemade and homespun. Home can offer refuge from the hostile world, or it can be a prison. People living together inevitably — sometimes intentionally — rub one another the wrong way. This chafing provides writers with rich material for art. (Remember, without conflict there is no story.) Are these writers working through their own failed relationships with mothers, fathers, and siblings? Sometimes. Are they exploring their conflicted feelings toward a home they left behind? Maybe. Are they holding up a mirror that allows us to see our own homes and families in a new light? Most certainly. Though the trappings of Happy families are all alike; home and family differ across every unhappy family is unhappy cultures, human families have in its own way. much in common. Legend has it that a man from Czechoslovakia, — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina after watching a production of August Wilson’s Fences (set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s), approached the playwright and asked him, “How did you know about my family?” Wilson may not have known that particular man’s family, but he knew about families and how the sins of the Getty Images / father play out in the lives of sons. 149 Artur Debat UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS Copyright © 2017 (and distributed by) Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution 06_JAG_8251_ch05_148_307.indd 149 18/08/16 12:26 PM 5 The readings in this chapter explore the theme of home and family within Home and Family a broad range of contexts. Franz Kafka’s modernist masterpiece, The Metamorphosis, is told from the point of view of a son whose transformation into a large bug renders him unable to support his middle- class family in the rapidly changing cityscape they call home. You’ll also find several selections of modernist fiction, poetry, and art that reflect early twentieth– century perceptions of human experience, particularly in urban centers — these works will help you explore the place The Metamorphosis occupies within modernist tradition. In Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” the speaker uses her own suffering as an example to chide her son, “So boy, don’t you turn back. / Don’t you set down on the steps / ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” Alice Munro’s “The Progress of Love” looks at family through the stories characters tell, retell, and revise about their shared memories. Let the literature on the following pages take you into other homes and families so that you can return to your own with new eyes. 150 UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS Copyright © 2017 (and distributed by) Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution 06_JAG_8251_ch05_148_307.indd 150 18/08/16 12:26 PM CENTRAL TEXT Fences AUGUST WILSON August Wilson (1945–2005) was born in Pittsburgh to a white father and an African American mother. When his father died in 1965, he changed his legal name (Frederick August Kittel) to August Wilson, assuming his mother’s maiden name. Brought up by his mother, he spent his early years in the Hill — a poor, multiracial district of Pittsburgh, the setting for his later work. His formal education ended when he dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen. He was largely self- educated, becoming acquainted with the works of leading AP Photo / Ted S. Warren African American writers through the Carnegie Library. He cofounded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District in 1968, and vowed to become a writer. This ambition was realized during the 1980s, when Wilson began writing The Pittsburgh Cycle — a remarkable collection of partially interconnected plays. Collectively, the plays portray the twentieth century from an African American perspective. The cycle garnered many awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes (for Fences in 1985 and The Piano Lesson in 1989); the tenth and final play, Radio Golf, was performed a few months before his death. Wilson’s influence lies in his ability, through larger- than- life characters and intense, perceptive characterization, to create a universal dimension in which issues of race and family in America are examined. In Fences, Troy Maxson embodies one of those larger- than- life characters. For Lloyd Richards, who adds to whatever setting The setting is the yard which fronts the he touches only entrance to the Maxson household, an ancient two-story brick house set back off a small When the sins of our fathers visit us alley in a big- city neighborhood. The entrance to We do not have to play host. the house is gained by two or three steps leading We can banish them with forgiveness to a wooden porch badly in need of paint. As God, in His Largeness and Laws. A relatively recent addition to the house and — August Wilson running its full width, the porch lacks congru- ence. It is a sturdy porch with a flat roof. One or Characters two chairs of dubious value sit at one end where troy maxson gabriel, Troy’s brother the kitchen window opens onto the porch. An jim bono, Troy’s friend cory, Troy and Rose’s son old-fashioned icebox stands silent guard at the rose, Troy’s wife raynell, Troy’s daughter opposite end. lyons, Troy’s oldest son by previous marriage The yard is a small dirt yard, partially fenced, except for the last scene, with a wooden sawhorse, a pile of lumber, and other CENTRAL TEXT 151 UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS Copyright © 2017 (and distributed by) Bedford, Freeman & Worth High School Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution 06_JAG_8251_ch05_148_307.indd 151 18/08/16 12:26 PM 5 fence-building equipment set off to the side. ACT I Home and Family Opposite is a tree from which hangs a ball made Scene 1 of rags. A baseball bat leans against the tree. Two It is 1957. troy and bono enter the yard, oil drums serve as garbage receptacles and sit engaged in conversation. troy is fifty- three years near the house at right to complete the setting. old, a large man with thick, heavy hands; it is this the play Near the turn of the century, the largeness that he strives to fill out and make an destitute of Europe sprang on the city with accommodation with. Together with his tenacious claws and an honest and solid dream. blackness, his largeness informs his sensibilities The city devoured them. They swelled its belly and the choices he has made in his life. until it burst into a thousand furnaces and Of the two men, bono is obviously the sewing machines, a thousand butcher shops and follower. His commitment to their friendship of bakers’ ovens, a thousand churches and thirty- odd years is rooted in his admiration of hospitals and funeral parlors and money- troy’s honesty, capacity for hard work, and his lenders. The city grew. It nourished itself and strength, which bono seeks to emulate. offered each man a partnership limited only by It is Friday night, payday, and the one night of his talent, his guile, and his willingness and the week the two men engage in a ritual of talk and capacity for hard work. For the immigrants of drink. troy is usually the most talkative and at Europe, a dream dared and won true. times he can be crude and almost vulgar, though he The descendants of African slaves were is capable of rising to profound heights of expression. offered no such welcome or participation. They The men carry lunch buckets and wear or carry came from places called the Carolinas and the burlap aprons and are dressed in clothes suitable to Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and their jobs as garbage collectors. Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled bono Troy, you ought to stop that lying! along the riverbanks and under bridges in troy I ain’t lying! The nigger had a watermelon shallow, ramshackle houses made of sticks and this big. (He indicates with his hands.) Talking tarpaper. They collected rags and wood. They sold about . “What watermelon, Mr. Rand?” the use of their muscles and their bodies. They I liked to fell out! “What watermelon, 5 cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined Mr. Rand?” . And it sitting there big as life. shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful bono What did Mr. Rand say? pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own troy Ain’t said nothing. Figure if the nigger too dream. That they could breathe free, finally, and dumb to know he carrying a watermelon, he stand to meet life with the force of dignity and wasn’t gonna get much sense out of him. 10 whatever eloquence the heart could call upon. Trying to hide that great big old watermelon By 1957, the hard- won victories of the under his coat. Afraid to let the white man European immigrants had solidified the industrial see him carry it home. might of America. War had been confronted and bono I’m like you . I ain’t got no time for won with new energies that used loyalty and them kind of people.

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